Will your future business travel be in a US$80million, Mach 1.8 business jet designed by Lockheed Martin’s ‘Skunk Works’? The answer is yes, if SAI (Supersonic Aerospace International) can put their QSST (Quiet Supersonic Transport) into production. But are these new planes any better for the planet? There are both pros and cons…
With a 4000 nautical mile range (4,600 miles, 7,400kms) and traveling at 1,188mph (1,911kph), a Chicago to LA flight will take only 2 hours and 15 minutes. If you are going overseas, then Seattle to Tokyo is only 5 hours flying time instead of almost 11 hours, so QSST business travel is halved compared to regular airline travel.
With state-of-the-art design, the sonic boom is claimed to be only 1/100th that of Concorde, although Concorde carried 100 passengers over the same range and over 10% faster. The QSST has a blended fuselage, wing and engine configuration and has over 22 other patents that help minimize the shock wave so that it can fly over populated areas without causing noise levels that will be noticed by the public, disturbing wildlife or any other detrimental effects from sonic booms.
The QSST carries 12-14 passengers in executive comfort and a future stretched version that can carry 20-25 passengers.
SAI plans to have a QSST flying by 2014, with the first QSST available for purchase and operation in 2016. They claim that the faster travel times facilitate business and international diplomacy, responding to medical emergencies such as organ transplants, critical patient delivery and time-critical supplies, as well as advancing the state-of-the-art.
As for the environmental impact in terms of GHGs, the QSST will likely be no better than for other passenger planes, and when fuel consumption per passenger traveled is taken into consideration, it is likely to be a lot higher than when flying on regular airlines in business class.
You can’t get away from simple basic physics — a higher thrust is needed to travel faster, so unless you can dramatically reduce air drag and aircraft weight, then flying only 24 people in an aircraft similar in size to a small airliner is going to consume a lot of fuel. The QSST does not need an afterburner, but considerable fuel resources will be used to accelerate through the sound barrier and maintain supersonic cruising speeds, so flying faster to the destination is not going to be a fuel saver.
Even if the extra business seats were converted to economy on the regular flights, with business travellers switching to these executive business jets, and assuming a full plane, the per-traveller GHG reduction on the regular airline won’t offset the increased business traveller GHG in the QSST. Maybe QSST flyers should have mandatory GHG emissions offsetting, which would be a small percentage on the ticket price and would be a premium the business traveller would have to pay for the privilege of speed with increased GHG emissions? In fact, perhaps all airline travellers should have mandatory carbon taxation, given that a transatlantic flight is approximately equivalent to driving a car for three months.
Trevor Williams is a University of Victoria Mechanical Engineering PhD candidate specialising in renewable energy, power grid modelling and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. He has a bachelors in Aeronautical Engineering, a Masters in Management Science and over 23 years international experience in the space industry, having worked on Earth observation and telecommunications satellites. He is the author of the Eco-Geek blog.
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